Wednesday, March 11, 2015

At one time, there was nothing I loved more than heading out to the movies for a good romantic comedy. There were the 90s-style Meg Ryan movies...

Sandra Bullock has always had a hit-or-miss career, but when her romantic comedies were good, they were really, really good.

And then came Goldie Hawn's daughter and all of her great romantic comedies.

But recently I've come to realize it's been a while since I've seen a really good romantic comedy. I blame it on Judd Apatow. He launched this movie in 2005...

And started an entire generation of movies that appeal to both men and women. It's probably a good thing that women no longer have to drag men to "chick flicks." Even Bridesmaids, a movie that seemed like a chick flick, had an entire scene devoted to women puking on formal gowns. It seemed like it went on for hours.

Sure, there have been a few romantic comedies, but most of today's "chick flicks" require a box of Kleenex. Either someone dies at the end (ANY Nicholas Sparks adaptation) or we're subjected to a Sex and the City-style look at dating in the big city (That Awkward Moment). Am I alone in missing the days of the totally cheesy romantic comedy?

Monday, March 09, 2015

In the 90s, when home computers became commonplace, most of us learned one lesson the hard way. Computers can suddenly, inexplicably, do this.

Your hard drive would crash and you'd have to reload everything. All of your hard work would be gone. Or you'd be working on a file and the power would go out. There was no auto-recover back then. If you didn't manually save your work along the way, you'd lose everything you'd worked on.

Back then, if you wanted to back up a file, you had to use a thing called a floppy disk. It would hold exactly 1.44 MB.

Then came a thing called the USB flash drive. (Jump drive was Lexar's brand name for it.)

Those are still around today and can even hold as much as a terabyte...which is likely FAR more than you'll ever, ever need. You can even find fun flash drives (like this 8GB Iron Man version).

But there are three problems with these. They can break, you have to remember to take them with you, and they cost $$$. Where's the best place to store your stuff?

You get 15GB free with Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive--both of which automatically sync all your files. They'll be out there even if you're logging in on your Aunt Judy's computer while on vacation. If you need more than that, you're going to have to pay every month, but both of these services are cheaper than Dropbox. If you install any of these apps, they'll run in the background, syncing your files automatically--so no more manually backing up files. They're always in the cloud.